Comment by nilirl
7 hours ago
Bottleneck for what? More features?
I don't think amount of software is what determines whether a company does well.
I don't think capturing quantity of context is that important either.
Now, quality of context. How well do the humans reason?
Then, attitude. How well do the humans respond to bad situations?
Then, resource management. How well does the company treat people and money?
Finally, luck. How much of the uncontrollables are in our favor?
Those are pretty good bottlenecks for a company. I doubt an agent is fixing any of those. At least any time soon.
For business, software applications are tools that facilitate "the thing" that generates money. (We in the software world think that _thing_ is software and software _features_, but outside that world, there's usually a different _thing_.)
The bottleneck for making software applications better at being used by (non-software) businesses is making sure the software does all the software things that actually benefit the business. Save time. Make humans more productive. Reduce human error. Make the business more efficient. Increase profit margins.
All of those things are a bit difficult to predict and quantify. You start with ideas of what might help the business, you maybe design, prototype, trial. Ultimately you build or enhance software applications, and try to measure how well they're making the business better.
In all of this, making sure software is addressing the right problem in the right way, and ultimately making the business better - that's a hard problem! Regardless of how fast and easy it is to make software.
But yes, the speed can really help. You can prototype and trial and improve the feedback loop.
> But yes, the speed can really help. You can prototype and trial and improve the feedback loop.
Based on what I’ve seen, prototyping has been always easy. You don’t even have to build software for the first iteration. For UI stuff you can use a wire-framing tool.
What has happened is that we abandoned the faster iteration methods (design think tank, quick demo and UX research,…) and we have full in on building the first idea that came in and fostering it on the users. That process is very slow and more often goes wrong.
Hmm not agile or waterfall....
Tsunami?
> Bottleneck for what? More features?
Code changes. Not necessarily features, but also bug fixes, plain old maintenance, and even refactoring to improve testability.
With AI coding assistants, what in the past were considered junior dev tasks are now implemented with a quick prompt and an agent working in the background.
These junior dev tasks are now effortlessly delivered by coding assistants, with barely any human intervention. Backlogs are cleared faster than new items are added. And new items are added more and more because capacity to clear them is no longer an issue. The challenge is now keeping up with the volume of changes. I see this first-hand at my org.
> Those are pretty good bottlenecks for a company. I doubt an agent is fixing any of those. At least any time soon.
Just because you can think of other bottlenecks that doesn't mean that generating code was not a bottleneck, and is not the bottleneck today. The mere notion of a backlog demonstrates that it is a bottleneck.
I was not merely stating other bottlenecks. I'm saying they're more important bottlenecks.
They can't all be equally important bottlenecks; a bottleneck is by definition a singular component or sub-system most-limiting to the system's output.
What are we trying to output from our businesses? Code?
What is this magical context floating around every business that will unlock AI agents to produce ... what?
[Edit] I apologize for my tone. You're right, dealing with the speed of code generation is an unprecedented problem. I was making the argument that it's not the most important to the business and that rate of code change is very rarely the top concern. But that does not mean it's not the most important problem for someone. For the developers dealing with the system, it is.